Gettin' Bizzy with Pair Design

#sxsw #pairdesign

Iap19300

Interaction designers the world over often work at their desks solo, headphones on, working deep inside their own head. When they come out of their bubble to show their work, they're often surprised at the response.
Cooper has solved the problem of the lone designer, by pioneering and perfecting the craft of interaction designers working in pairs. Generally, there’s 1 interaction designer responsible for generating ideas, or a “gen”, and 1 interaction designer for synthesizing ideas, or a “synth”. Come hear two of Cooper's most senior designers discuss this practice and the ways that you can use pair design to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and morale in your teams.

Presenters

Christopher Noessel

Managing Dir

Cooper

In my day job as a Director at Cooper, I design products, services, and strategy for a variety of domains, including health, financial, and consumer. In prior experience I've developed interactive kiosks and spaces for museums, helped to visualize the future of counter-terrorism, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern healthcare.

My spidey sense goes off about random topics, and this has led me to speak at conferences about a wide range of things including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, and, most recently, the relationship between science fiction and interface design. I was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into-legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where my grad thesis was a service design for lifelong learners called Fresh.

Suzy Thompson

Dir of Interaction Design

Cooper

As a Director of Interaction Design at Cooper, I lead design and strategy engagements for products ranging from broadly targeted consumer applications to complex, mission-critical business software. As a design partner and creative director, I'm known for my skepticism, tenacity, and spot-on analysis and design instincts. Prior to joining Cooper in 2005, I served a variety of product analyst and design roles over the course of ten years at PeopleSoft, Inc.